“Look at the time stamp,” Lucas said. “It was, what, five days before they hit Smalls? They must have been watching him, and knew he’d be going up there with Whitehead.”
“You don’t get that just by watching,” Rae said. “They bugged him.”
The email had gone from Moore to Ritter.
Lucas said, “We need to tell the FBI guys about this. Then we go bust Moore. He’s toast.We got our new guy. The only question now is, do we put him in a cell or wire him up?”
—
HE FOUGHTthrough the FBI bureaucracy again, finally arriving at the desk of Jane Chase’s assistant. The assistant said that Miz Chase was in a conference. Lucas said, “This is quite important. Go into the conference, right now, and tell her the U.S. Marshalsare calling with information she’d want. She’ll know what you’re talking about.”
The assistant hesitated, then said, his voice pitching up with mild exasperation, “Well, I’ll do it, but I hope you’re not getting me in trouble.”
“I promise, I’m not.”
Two minutes later, Chase said, “Hello?”
“Agent Chase? This is Lucas Davenport, the U.S Marshal from the meeting—”
“I remember,” she said, her voice dry as desert sand. “What do you want?”
“You’re aware that one of our targets, James Ritter, was murdered?”
“I was informed of that, yes. Your man Forte called.”
“We seized Ritter’s laptop...”
“Which I understand is heavily encrypted.”
“Yes. The other marshals and I cracked the code this morning. We have a number of documents about shipments from Heracles to Libya, Iraq, and Niger, although it doesn’t say what the shipments were. But it looks to me like it might be stuff they don’t want anyone to know about. From our perspective, the more important document apparently locates a suspect named Moore at Senator Smalls’s cabin and also pinpoints the location where the logs we found with paint from Smalls’s Cadillac on them were dumped. We’re thinking of busting Moore right away. The question is, do we drop him in a cell or see if he’ll wear a wire for us? Or might the FBI have a different idea altogether?”
“Wait. You cracked the encryption code? I was told by experts that couldn’t be done,” she said.
“Yeah, well... what can I tell you? We’re marshals.”
After considering that, she said, “I’m jammed up in the early afternoon, but I’ll clear my schedule for later on. Be here at four o’clock. You’ll be met in the lobby. Bring the documents you’ve found with you. We will have some of our specialists look at them.”
Lucas told her that the computer guy at Quantico could have them to her in seven minutes, and she said, “Excellent. I will retrieve them from him. Your diligence is to be commended. We’ll see you here at four.”
She hung up, and Lucas said to Bob and Rae, “There is a woman not just with a stick up her ass but an entire fuckin’ tree. With branches.”
Rae said, “You gotta be straight to get as high up as she is with the feebs.”
“Like you,” Lucas said.
Rae said, “Nah. I just gotta be willing to shoot any dumbass motherfucker stupid enough to run from me. Which I am willing to do. And I have to take care of the Stump, of course.”
“For which I’m eternally grateful,” Bob said.
—
LUCAS CHECKEDhis cell phone. “Four o’clock—three hours. Maybe I’ll work out. Too hot to go shopping.”
“Take a nap,” Rae said. “Or I could drive down to Quantico and meet Smith for a drink. He could give me a back rub. I could use a good rub.”
Bob said, “I’ve been thinking...”
Rae: “Oh-oh. You know what I told you about that.”
